The Numbers Are Unsustainable by Robert Socha

On July 1, 2025, the Senate passed an amended version of the One Big Beautiful Budget Act (OBBBA). Congress’s Central Business Office (CBO) purports this budget will cut a whopping $1.2T (trillion for those in Rio Linda) from the approximately $6.8T annual budget, but that’s not the case. It cuts $160B per year over 10 years. That is a measly 1.8 per cent! That’s like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping knife wound. Sure, it has the appearance of trying to fix the problem, but it has no real effect in stemming the flow. It is pandering to a base desperate for DOGE-style cuts across the board. They yell cut, cut, cut from the Chamber, yet somehow the deficit spending increases hand over foot.

If one earns $68,000 per year and needs to make significant lifestyle changes to avoid bankruptcy, will shaving $100/month in spending have a lasting effect? It will help, for sure, but probably not solve the problem.

Alarmingly, the CBO also warns that the tax cuts implemented in this bill will reduce federal revenue by $3.7T—$4.7 T over the same ten-year period, increasing the deficit by an estimated $2.4T—$3.4 T in that time.

The total US debt is approximately $36.2T and is expected to pass $37T this coming October. The numbers are so astronomically astounding that one can scarcely understand the gravity of such monumental sums. It is the equivalent of having spent over $2,000,000/hour since the advent of Christ.

In a 1780 letter to Robert Morris, Benjamin Franklin stated, “We may make these times better if we bestir ourselves. … The great affair is to move with caution and to avoid increasing the public debt, which is already too heavy for the people to bear.”

He also warned in Poor Richard’s Almanac to “Beware of little expenses, a small leak will sink a great ship.”

The men who founded our great nation were rife with warnings about fiscal responsibility. Alexander Hamilton warned in his First Report on the Public Credit (1790), “The creation of debt should always be accompanied with the means of extinguishment.” I dare say our Congress has overlooked those means for well over 100 years!

In a quote I thought was attributed to a founding father, but I have learned is attributed to a 19th-century Scottish historian, Alexander Tytler, offers a stark realization: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.” We have been well down this path since the purest form of our government existed on September 17, 1787 when the Constitution was ratified. What I find remarkably hopeful is that our electorate has bucked this trend and voted into office a government purportedly trying to right this listing ship.

Maybe the OBBBA is a step in the direction of fiscal responsibility, and will catalyst our Congress into making more significant cuts moving forward, and also encoding into law these cuts so the DOGE effect will be lasting and effective. It is impossible to do a complete 180 degree turn and immediately abandon the largesse we’ve been voting and accustomed to for decades, but, just as the Left would baby step their ideology into the culture making radical transformative changes over time, it is my hope the reverse is true and the People will have the intestinal fortitude to stay the course until our behemoth is reigned in and over time, returned to a government restrained by Constitutional chains, of, for, and by the People.